University of Toronto residence sets green design benchmark

The residence met the Passive House Classic certification standard through a combination of factors: it is equipped with the minimum 200 millimetres of insulation beneath its green roof, triple-glazed windows, an energy recovery ventilation system that transfers heat from stale air, and a system for wastewater heat recovery.

Unlike smaller Passive House builds that usually rely on solar gain for heat, Harmony Commons uses “internal thermal gains”—like heat from residents’ bodies and their electronics and appliances—to keep things cozy inside.

The building retains all this “waste” heat so well that keeping the residence cool enough in the warmer months was one of the biggest design challenges.

“You’ll need [cooling] further into October and probably in March,” passive house consultant Lois Arena told CBC News back in November, 2020, as construction work began. But the building’s stable indoor temperatures mean less energy overall is required for cooling.

“Although the up-front costs for such a structure can be about 10% higher than a conventional building, annual fuel use for heating and cooling can be 80-90% lower,” CBC wrote at the time, citing Passive House Canada.

Developed by Fengate Asset Management in partnership with the University of Toronto, Harmony Commons “was constructed on behalf of the LiUNA [Labourers’ International Union of North America] Pension Fund of Central and Eastern Canada, one of Fengate’s largest investors,” Sustainable Biz says.

“Achieving Passive House certification for Harmony Commons is the embodiment of LiUNA and Fengate’s values of sustainability and community,” Fengate Real Estate President Jaime McKenna said in an announcement celebrating the formal certification.

LiUNA has an ongoing commitment to building fossil infrastructure alongside what it calls “new technologies” like solar panels, wind turbines, and green roofs. This “all-of-the-above” policy is not aligned with a credible path to climate safety, SHIFT Action Executive Director Adam Scott told The Energy Mix, but the union pension fund’s investment in this project “certainly is.”

Six years in the making, Harmony Commons has doubled the residence capacity of U of T’s Scarborough campus. It has also improved the quality of campus life, for residents and others.

“In addition to the accommodations, Harmony Commons offers residents a number of onsite amenities including a dining hall, common lounge and study space on each floor, outdoor roof garden and terrace, community kitchen, laundry facilities, and indoor bicycle storage,” Sustainable Biz says.

And the building is beautiful. In a deliberate break with the traditional “quad” structure of student housing, the residence is u-shaped, opening up onto a “treasured grove of trees” [pdf].

Andrew Arifuzzaman, the university’s chief administrative officer, said the building’s impact goes beyond campus. “We’ve shown the industry that this type of project can be done in this market and at this scale,” Arifuzzaman said.